'Truth spoken without moderation reverses itself'
This blog is a source for intellectual exploration. It includes a list of alternative resources and a source of free books. The placement of an article does not imply that I agree with it, merely that I found it thought-provoking. There are also poems and book reviews. Texts written by me are labelled. Readers are free to re-post anything they like.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

How everything became war // William Hartung: What Happens When All We Have Left Is The Pentagon? Trump’s Vision of a Militarized America

Once, war was a
temporary state of affairs - a violent but brief interlude between times of
peace. Today, America’s wars are everywhere and forever: our enemies change
constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a
weapon. As war expands, so does the role of the US military. Today, military
personnel don’t just “kill people and break stuff.” Instead, they analyze
computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on
electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You
name it, the military does it. Rosa Brooks traces
this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional
perspective—that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two
anti-war protesters and a human rights activist married to an Army Green Beret.

Her experiences lead her to an urgent warning: When the boundaries around war
disappear, we risk destroying America’s founding values and the laws and
institutions we’ve built - and undermining the international rules and
organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos. If Russia and
China have recently grown bolder in their foreign adventures, it’s no accident;
US precedents have paved the way for the increasingly unconstrained use of
military power by states around the globe. Meanwhile, we continue to pile new
tasks onto the military, making it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats
America will face in the years to come. By turns a memoir,
a work of journalism, a scholarly exploration into history, anthropology and
law, and a rallying cry, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything transforms the familiar into the alien, showing us
that the culture we inhabit is reshaping us in ways we may suspect, but don’t
really understand. It’s the kind of book that will leave you moved, astonished,
and profoundly disturbed, for the world around us is quietly changing beyond
recognition - and time is running out to make things right. (Interview with Rosa Brooks) https://geographicalimaginations.com/2016/07/11/how-everything-became-war/

At over $600 billion a year and counting, the Pentagon
already receives significantly more than its fair share of federal funds.
If President Donald Trump has his way, though, that will prove a sum for pikers
and misers. He and his team are now promising that spending on defense
and homeland security will increase dramatically in the years to come, even as
domestic programs are slashed and entire civilian agencies shuttered.

The new administration
is reportedly considering a plan -- modeled on proposals from the
military-industrial-complex-backed Heritage Foundation -- that would cut a
staggering $10.5 trillion in federal spending over the next decade. The
Departments of Energy, Commerce, Transportation, and State might see their
budgets slashed to the bone; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be
privatized; and (though the money involved would amount to chicken feed) the
National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities would be eliminated
altogether. In the meantime, the ranks of the Army and Marines would be
expanded, a huge naval buildup would be launched, and a new Star Wars-style
missile defense system would be developed -- all at a combined cost of up to $1 trillion beyond the already
munificent current Pentagon plans for that same decade.

The
specifics won’t be known until Trump’s first budget becomes public in perhaps
April or May, but as we wait for it, Republican Senate Armed Services Committee
Chairman John McCain has just taken the unusual step of releasing his own spending blueprint for the military. It suggests
that a key senator and the president and his team are on the same page when it
comes to military funding. At an extra $430 billion over the next five years,
the numbers in McCain’s plan are similar to the potential Trump buildup.

One thing is already
clear: this drastic tilt toward yet more Pentagon spending and away from
investment in diplomacy abroad and civilian needs at home will only further
militarize American society, accelerate inequality, and distort the country’s
already highly questionable foreign policy. After all, if your military
is the only well-funded, well-stocked arm of the government, it’s obvious whom
you’re going to turn to in any crisis.

This process was
already visibly underway even before Donald Trump took the oath of
office. His gut decision to entrust national security policymaking only
to military figures was particularly troubling. From National Security
Adviser Michael Flynn to Secretary of Defense James Mattis to head of the
Department of Homeland Security John Kelly, retired generals and other
ex-military types now abound in his administration. Defense analyst and former
White House budget official Gordon Adams summed up the risks of this approach recently in this
way: “Putting military
officers in charge of the entire architecture of national security reinforces
the trend toward militarizing policy and risks cementing in place ‘the military-industrial
complex’ that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of. To borrow the
psychologist Abraham H. Maslow’s words, if all the men around President Trump
are hammers, the temptation will be ‘to treat everything as if it were a
nail.’”

How the Military
Came to Dominate Foreign Policy: President Trump won’t, of course, be starting from scratch in his urge
to further elevate the military in foreign and domestic affairs. He’s
building on a process that’s already well under way. In the Obama years,
for instance, there were a record number of drone strikes, especially outside
official U.S. war zones -- 10 times the number launched by the Bush
administration. Similarly, the Obama administration paved the way for
various Trumpian urges by waging wars on multiple fronts and instituting a historic crackdown on whistleblowers in the military
and the intelligence communities. It also approved record levels of U.S.
arms sales abroad, $278 billion worth of them, or more than double those
of the Bush years. (In Trumpian terms: jobs!)

In addition, as part of his pledge to avoid large,
“boots-on-the-ground” conflicts like the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of
Iraq, President Obama oversaw a sharp increase in the size of the U.S. Special
Operations forces, sending them abroad to arm, train, and fight alongside
militaries in 138 countries in 2016. Think of this approach --
having a “lighter footprint” while expanding the number of conflicts the United
States is involved in -- as a case of what I’ve called “politically sustainable warfare.” It seems cheaper, is far
less visible, and involves fewer U.S. casualties than full-scale invasions and
occupations.

In these years, the
Pentagon has also continued to encroach on turf previously occupied by the
State Department and the Agency for International Development, including
funding its own arms and training programs and engaging in economic development projects. Under the euphemistic
term “building partner capacity,” the Pentagon now has the authority to arm and train foreign military forces through no less
than 70 separate programs... read more:

Rosa Brooks: I
think it was seeing in action all the contradictions that I talk about in the
book. Just being at the Pentagon, with both this incredible idealism of so many
people in the military and the incredible talent, and, yet, at the same time,
this sense of this enormous institution that has come completely unmoored from
any clear sense of purpose. It is simultaneously raining missiles via drones
down on people, preparing for major wars, trying to launch micro-enterprise
programs for Afghan women, training parliamentarians in Iraq—it really just
crystallized for me that we don’t know what war is anymore. We don’t know what
the military is anymore…. Read more: